ECE News Story

Rotkowitz Joins ECE Faculty

Rotkowitz Joins ECE Faculty

Professor Michael Rotkowitz joins the ECE Controls faculty.

Assistant Professor Michael Rotkowitz joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in the spring of 2012. This past summer, he was invited to have a joint faculty appointment of the University of Maryland Institute of Systems Research (ISR). His research is in decentralized control, optimization and sparse estimation. He is teaching courses this year in probability and in convex optimization.

Rotkowitz received a B.S. degree in Mathematical and Computational Science (with Honors and with Distinction) from Stanford University in 1996. After working for J.P. Morgan Investment Management, New York, until 1998, he returned to Stanford and received his Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2005. During that time, he also received an M.S. degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics and the M.S. degree in Statistics, and worked for NASA Ames Research Center.

Dr. Rotkowitz was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Electrical Engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden from 2005-6, and a Research Fellow in the Department of Information Engineering at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia from 2006-8. He then joined the University of Melbourne where he held the positions of Queen Elizabeth II Fellow and Future Generation Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, as well as Honorary Fellow in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

His awards include the 2007 George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award, given for the best paper in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control over a 2-year span, and the 2011 SIAM Control and Systems TheoryPrize, which was conferred: “for Contributions to the theory of optimal controller synthesis fordecentralized systems subject to information and control constraints.